


Freeze Your Brain

by DustyForgotten



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Mothership Zeta, Operation: Anchorage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 21:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14506023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DustyForgotten/pseuds/DustyForgotten
Summary: Command always comes with loss, and the Lone Wanderer knows it.





	Freeze Your Brain

“You can head back, if you want,” Erin says, threading her legs through the strats of a railing. “I can kill the generator on my own.”

“Yeah, but why would you want to?”

Her legs hang over the dry-freeze haze, bracing cold of the Cryo Lab nothing like the radiation burn of home, but the cold takes her back to Anchorage— Elliott holding his rifle even over the bodies of every alien and mutie in this wing, like a proper soldier. She couldn’t even fake it for the simulation.

“I just want to sit for a while,” she suggests. The ship is big, but nothing like she’s walked in a day. Behind her, the medic shoulders his rifle. He even sits beside her.

Beckett and Daniels lay expired on the floor before them, unnoticed at the time, in all the fray. “They were good men,” the Private mourns.

“I know.” She heard the recording: nothing but a name and serial number, over and over, through the shouting and sounds of pain. The two that survived barely had, put their agonies aside and fought to the very end. “Command always comes with loss.”

He looks over, blonde and wide-eyed, medic that thought the army was the right thing to do. The Lone Wanderer can relate. “How come we’re all alive?”

Colonel Hartigan comes to mind; every name and face she’s forgotten just from being away too long. Generic American sniper and a couple of infantry, requisitioned like weapons, disappearing in a wave of holographic pixels, thanking God Benji was essential, because she couldn’t have done it without him. “We’re not done yet.”

Tercorien’s quiet, but she overheard him tell the kid she wouldn’t die, even with his kit empty. “For the record,” he quarrels, clearing his throat, “if I die, doing this. It was worth it.”

“You’re a bleeding heart, Elliott,” Erin grumbles, even sitting in wake with his dead squadmates.

He smiles, somehow, and keeps that comment to himself.


End file.
